September 03, 2013

Tricia Robertson is a paranormal investigator in Glasgow, a recent president of the Scottish Society for Psychical Research. She has been involved in a number of investigations and some years ago co-authored a much-praised research study into mediums.

I met Tricia a year or so ago when she invited me to talk to the SSPR in Glasgow. It was a pleasant trip, and she had some interesting tales to tell. Now she has published a book titled Things You Can Do When You’re Dead! A cool title - although not, as I first thought, about what dead people do in their new existence but rather about them communicating with the living (as the subtitle actually makes clear). It’s a good read by someone who really knows her stuff.

She starts with a startling case of the crisis apparition type. A retired Navy pilot named Bob is returning from a foreign trip and arrives at Glasgow airport expecting a friend to pick him up. There’s no sign of the friend, but he catches sight of another pilot, a man 20 years younger named Jack whom he used to know well when they flew on the same airline. Jack is coming towards him, grinning; they exchange pleasantries, and then he rushes off to catch a plane. The following day Bob sees an obituary in a newspaper about Jack, who it appears died after an illness in an Edinburgh hospital – two days before the meeting.

It fell to Tricia to investigate the case and she contacted the head of security at Glasgow airport. The security videotape had already been wiped and reused, but there was some interesting information in the flight schedule.

Upon checking aeroplane timetables for that day we discovered that there was a flight to Jack’s small hometown at 3.00pm on the day in question and the checkout desk for that flight was the end desk which Bob saw his friend
running towards. (It is worth noting again that Bob checked his watch at 2.45pm). The chief of security also established, subsequently, that the coffin of an airline pilot was transported through Glasgow Airport about that time and certainly on that day, having been already transferred from Edinburgh. Although we cannot pinpoint the exact time of this coffin transfer we know for certain that it was loaded on to an aircraft bound for Jack’s hometown destination on that day. One possible answer to this mystery would have been if Jack had a twin brother or a brother who looked exactly like him, and who also knew Bob, but he did not. No other person with even the same surname was on board that 3 o’clock flight.

The pilot, an atheist with no interest or belief in such matters, was deeply shaken by the incident.

There are other cases of ghosts and apparitions, followed by cases of the poltergeist type that Tricia investigated. A professional couple build a conservatory in which weird things start happening: a pungent and pervasive smell of tobacco, doors and windows repeatedly found open, anomalous movements of objects. While showing a friend round, the house owner points out a heavy straw model of a Viking ship on a shelf.

As they looked up, one of the straw paddles very slowly detached itself from the vessel, rose up about two inches and travelled half way across the room horizontally before it gently floated to the floor in a deliberate zig zag manner. Even a feather would have travelled faster.

Investigating the case Tricia learned that the couple had a friend who used to visit often but who they made to smoke his pipe outside. They promised that when the new conservatory was built he could smoke in it, but he got ill and died before that happened. The tobacco smoke is a giveaway: it’s natural to suppose, assuming survival to be a reality, that the friend had dropped in to say hello and to convey the fact of his still being around, so to speak. That seems dimly to have occurred to the couple as a possibility – but they found it very hard to accept; Tricia says the idea of it made the woman hysterical.

Tricia describes a number of other cases that are anyone familiar with the poltergeist literature will recognise – mostly seeming to be caused by discarnates, friendly or otherwise. One that was investigated by her colleague Archie Roy in the 1970s involved very disruptive activity over an extended period. At one point it seemed as if someone

with an enormous sledgehammer was taking it and hammering it against the side of the house to such an extent that the whole house shook, a blow coming every 5 seconds or so, hour after hour, till in desperation one would say, ‘Oh stop it.’ And it would stop. For a while . . . on one occasion after a long interval of blessed silence Max said, I believe we will get to the bottom of this. Immediately there was a sustained banging as if to say, ‘oh, no you won’t’.

There’s quite a bit on mediums, including a drop-in type case of a company director who died in a car accident, but was able to communicate to a colleague in a dream the presence of important papers in the wrecked car; these were eventually found sandwiched between the crushed metal. The material is filled out here and there with classic cases from the archives, such as the famous R101 episode involving Eileen Garrett. There is also a chapter about healers named Gary Mannion and Nina Knowlan, with some striking examples; and one on past-life memory cases – this includes the young Glaswegian boy named Cameron who talked about a previous life on the island of Barra.

Cameron used to speak to his brother about Barra constantly, so much so that the brother would yell in despair, “Gonnie shut up about Barra” He used to say to Norma [his mother] “You’ve only got one toilet in this house, in Barra we had three.” He never changed his story. He said to Norma “You would like my Barra Mum, she’s nice, and we could go and see her” He said it with such affection. He spoke about living in a white house and being able to see the beach from his bedroom window as it looked on to the beach and that the sheep used to come up to the front door of the house. He said that there were boxes outside the house, where he thought that fish was kept.

He gave details of the family group. He had three brothers and three sisters. “They were allowed to go and play on the beach on their own but I had to have someone with me.” He spoke about playing with a black and white dog and often referred to a big black car and the fact that there were always plenty of children around to play with. He never referred to his own name, but said that his father was called Shane, and said that his father had stepped out onto a road and was knocked down by a car. He also said that he was with him when this happened. (We have no information if this happened in Barra, Glasgow or elsewhere).

When Norma asked him about his mother’s name he replied “She was called Mummy” a response delivered with a kind of scathing look. He enthusiastically told Norma that his Barra Mum has long hair down to “there” as he pointed to below his waist and then he added, “but she got it cut shorter”. He kept saying “You’ll like her Mum when you see her, when we go to Barra. Please can we go? You’ll like her.”

The family did nothing for some time, but eventually responded to a press advert appealing for parents in this situation to come forward. The outcome was a TV documentary film in which the family were flown to Barra: the house that Cameron claimed to have lived in was identified, and many of the details verified.

Reading the book I was struck yet again by the gulf that exists between, on the one hand, the science that tells us such things do not happen, and, on the other, the findings of investigators that suggests they actually happen rather often, and more than most of us probably realise. It’s a world away from laboratories equipped with complex and expensive gadgetry, supported by massive funding to create exciting new technologies; that science is uncertain when it comes to peering into homes, families and human relations, where such things typically occur. As we know, if what emerges does not chime with what science understands about the accessible world of matter it’s dismissed as anecdote and fancy.

But this is not anecdote in the usual pejorative sense. What we know about it – that part which we can consider at all reliable – comes from investigators like Tricia Robertson, who must travel to the locality – often at some distance - win the trust of the people involved and corroborate the events as far as is possible. If we continue to regard them as anecdotes, it’s only in the sense that they are reports of human experience, stories with characters and incidents, accounts that must first be narrated in order to be accessed at all.

From her experiences and research Tricia has become a robust believer in the survival of consciousness after death. But as a practical investigator her interest is more in the events themselves than in their spiritual and metaphysical implications. It’s natural for readers unfamiliar with such things to wonder whether the people at the centre of them may be attention-seekers, or unbalanced, or following some concealed agenda; in her experience they are ordinary folk to whom something rather disturbing has occurred. They seem mostly confused, as any of us would be, often also anxious and desperate for the problem to be go away. Much of her work involves developing trust with people in these situations, and providing reassurance. She comments:

One thing that we have come to accept is that there is always a reason behind the production of phenomena; once you have pinpointed a possible reason, whether it is on-going or historical, incarnate or discarnate in source, then you can begin to look towards a possible resolution, or at least some kind of understanding.

Science may not formally recognise the existence of such things, but we’re reminded that they happen just the same and that we have to learn how to deal with them.

February 01, 2012

I've had a project in mind for some time now, and it's starting to take shape. It's a response to the objection that there is no evidence for psychic phenomena.

The complaint is largely rhetorical, of course. The implication is that the evidence, being anecdotal, is too weak to merit consideration: in other words it isn't really evidence.

But I believe a lot of people think there is no evidence - literally. And the best reason I can think of for this is that they seldom hear about it directly. Take a subject like poltergeists: it's just not on the general radar, except as something that people 'believe in'; there's little sense of it as a distinct phenomenon.

I believe we'd benefit from listening to people who have experienced it. It might improve the level of the debate.

So my idea is to try to make the primary sources more accessible, taking advantage of the e-book revolution. I've made a start by publishing a collection of poltergeist reports on Amazon Kindle.

These are the original eyewitness accounts, the source of much of what is known about the phenomenon, in the form of letters, diary entries, pamphlets and journal articles. There's Stans, which I covered here recently, and Hydesville, which I discussed a year ago (full list below). These very dramatic cases are striking, but the sober observations of investigators are just as interesting, for instance the so-called Atlantic Monthly case, which is frequently cited in books, and the Worksop poltergeist investigated by Frank Podmore on behalf of the Society for Psychical Research.

Much of this can be found somewhere online, in some form or other (some of it is here under 'resources'). But I suspect there's a limit to the amount of time people want to spend reading material on a computer screen. The material also has to be located and accessed, which can be fiddly. If you can treat it as a book, and download it onto your Kindle for a few pence and in a matter of seconds - and then read it on the bus, or wherever - then it might circulate a bit more.

As I described in Randi's Prize, in the beginning I did struggle to think of these events as hoaxes and natural events. But my imagination wasn't equal to the task, and I had to give up. I've no doubt that sceptics will have better luck, and I shall be curious to see, a) whether they avail themselves of the opportunity to read about these experiences, and b) how they will formulate their responses. I wonder, in particular, how insistent they will continue to be that the witnesses of the mysterious rapping noises at Hydesville were actually hearing two little girls bumping apples on the floor.

I believe that the accumulated effect of reading these narratives is to instil the sense of a quite distinct, psychokinetic phenomenon, one that cannot be blithely dismissed in terms of children's games. That, at least, has been my experience.

These are obviously older cases, and the style and language can take a bit of adjusting to, particularly the eighteenth century ones. On the other hand they happened to human beings just like us, so they're hardly any less relevant. And it's good to read the actual detail of what occurred. I've also provided summaries of more recent twentieth century cases, including Matthew Manning and Columbus, Ohio (Tina Resch) - for the purposes of comparison, to show that all belong essentially to the same category of experience. However I omitted several, such as the investigation of the Enfield poltergeist, as Guy Lyon Playfair has recently republished his excellent book on the subject - This House is Haunted; and the recent South Shields case, which I reviewed here and which has also been written up by the investigators.

I've got another half dozen or so ideas for similar compilations, which I'll try to get round to over the next few months. It's quite time-consuming to photocopy, scan, correct and format, so it may be a while. In the meantime, if anyone else has ideas about what would be good to put out there, or would like to get involved, then please get in touch.

October 18, 2011

One of the fullest descriptions of poltergeist activity is a nineteenth century case that took place in Stans, Switzerland. I first came across it in Gauld and Cornell's Poltergeists, and from their summary and extracts found it to be one of the most dramatic cases I'd ever come across. Pure Hollywood. The source is a pamphlet written in the mid 1860s by Melchior Joller, the lawyer whose household had been torn apart, and who was anxious to give the true story of the events, based on the diary he kept at the time.

However it's in German, so is not as well known as it deserves to be. So I've been amusing myself in my spare time by doing an English translation. It's quite long, about 40 pages in the original. You can read the full version here if you're interested, and I plan to make it available on Kindle in due course (for free). In the meantime, here's a summary.

We're talking about a large ramshackle old house on the outskirts of Stans, a small town in the central part of German-speaking Switzerland, near Lake Lucerne (see picture - it was torn down quite recently). It was occupied by Joller, a 42-year-old lawyer and member of parliament who had lived in it all his life, and his wife and seven children. The events started slowly in late 1860, when various members of the household - although not Joller himself - started hearing odd knockings from bedsteads and walls. They were especially alarmed when, as happened in some cases, the knockings appeared to respond to their spoken commands. However whenever they told Joller about it, he told them it was superstitious fancy, and to forget about it.

One day when the children were alone in the house, things started to get more serious.

During the course of the morning 14-year-old Melanie was alone with the housemaid when she mentioned that her younger sister Henriette often heard a peculiar knocking on the wall of the bathroom, so the two of them went there to look. Henriette came by at that moment and confirmed what she had said. But Melanie couldn't hear anything and wouldn't believe it, calling out loudly 'in God's name, if something is there, then come out and knock!' And immediately there was a knocking, like someone rapping with his knuckles. Then Oscar turned up, and hearing what had happened made the same demand, and again it immediately answered with the same knocking. When their older brother Edward heard what was going on he too rushed up and made the same request and for the third time it gave the same answer.

Terrified, they flew headlong out of the house and sat on the bottom of the front steps. At this point an oval stone, roughly the size of a fist, flew between Melanie and the youngest boy Alfred, who was standing quite near to her, however without hurting either of them. After a while they plucked up enough courage to go back in and get their lunch, finding all the cupboard doors in the downstairs living room and chamber, big and small, wide open. They closed them and went into the kitchen, from where they saw that the door of my study was also standing open. They closed it and took out the key, but soon it was standing wide open again. Thinking it might be because of an air current, they closed the windows and shut the doors firmly, and then stood by the front door, to see whether it would open again. Nothing happened, but the moment they turned to go the door stood wide open. Again they closed it. Now they clearly heard the muffled steps of someone coming down the stairs. Then the bedroom door opened again; they closed it and bolted it but the moment their backs were turned it opened again. As things were getting ever more peculiar, they again left the house.

It was time for lunch so the maid went back into the kitchen. Looking towards the corridor, she thought she saw someone hanging a sheet from one corner down the stairs from the upstairs banister. Observing more closely, it seemed to be rounded off at the top and with two long black marks at the bottom, like the tips of two feet. Shocked she called out, "who's there?" With a sound like "Wuh", the form suddenly vanished, at which the girl went white and stumbled outside screaming.

The children spent the day outside in the barn, venturing near to the house every so often. But things became so extremely weird - groans, strange shapes flitting around, doors constantly springing open, and other bizarre events - that when their mother came back in the evening she found them outside weeping with terror.

Joller seems to have been typical of many educated men of his time, conventionally religious, but at the same time holding a modern, progressive outlook and an interest in science. So far he had no direct experience of the phenomenon, and was exasperated at repeated mention of it. If they bothered him any more about it, he warned his children, he'd take a stick to their backsides.

Soon afterwards his wife heard the familiar knockings in the corridor and made him come and listen. He agreed it was odd, but since it was getting late he said he'd get to the bottom of it the following day. In the meantime he read aloud from an improving book on the evils on superstition, in the hope that it would persuade his family to stop being so stupid. Right on cue, the noises started up again, and he spent the rest of the evening in a fruitless search for the cause.

The next day the disturbances started in earnest.

The din began again at six o'clock in the morning and spread all over the house. It started underneath the living room door, two or three quick blows as if made by a heavy wooden mallet; this was followed by a heavy knocking on the doors ... and in various places upstairs, with short pauses between. The knocking on the doors sometimes ended with strong blows...

All the time the racket was going on all over the house - now here, now there; now upstairs, now downstairs - with increasing strength. I narrowed my investigation down to the phenomenon itself, which seemed to occur at short intervals mainly on the doors and floors of the living room and lower bedroom. I placed my hand on the door, variously on the inside and outside, and on the upper half around which the blows were perceptible, yet without feeling anything on my hand, not even a draught or disturbance of air. I also held the door half-open, so as to observe it from both sides; the rapping occurred again without my perceiving any cause.

I went and stood outside while my family observed from inside - for a long time in vain. Eventually there were such mighty thumps on the door between the bedroom and the kitchen that each time, being made of soft pinewood, it visibly bent. At around ten o'clock I went and stood by the bedroom door and gently pulled back the bolt so that the door was only just held on the latch. My wife stood with one of the boys some twenty-two paces behind me, placed so that when the door opened she could see the kitchen window in the background, whilst I could only see the dark kitchen wall.

After a little while the door was so powerfully struck that it flew open and hit the wall. In that moment I saw - I was certain of it - something dark, although I couldn't make out its shape precisely against the dim background. It shot like lightning from the door to the side of the chimney. Rushing after it, and before I could say a word, my wife and son called out that they had just clearly seen a dark-brown half arm bone dart back from the door, and their assertions were so quick and simultaneous there could be no doubt this apparition had passed in front of them... I made a stringent search of the chimney, but found it empty, with no mark on the fallen soot, nor any other clue.

The next day Joller got back from work to find the whole family outside, shaking with terror. He went inside and found that the disturbances repeated every few minutes, including blows on the floor "so violent, it was as though a wooden mallet was being swung with all the strength of a powerful arm, causing the living room table to spring in the air and displacing the objects sitting on it." The heavy living room door burst open and slammed shut again "with the greatest force", and there were blows on the bedroom door that were so strong he feared it break into pieces at any moment.

Joller was becoming seriously alarmed, especially as crowds were starting to gather in the street outside. He got various local worthies to come and help, who although they could plainly see and hear what was going on, could only offer vague speculations that led nowhere. He then told the police, who also observed the phenomena, and by the middle of the next week the town council had authorised an official investigation.

Joller seems to have hoped this would take over the burden, but to his bitter disappointment it petered out without achieving anything. This seems at least partly because the family had temporarily moved out while the investigation was in progress, and in their absence the phenomena largely disappeared. Yet as soon as the investigation terminated and the family returned, it all started again in force.

From early September to the third week in October the Jollers were effectively left to cope on their own,. By this time they dared not sleep in the house, and instead lodged nearby, but the phenomena raged during the day while they were there. The backdrop was the bangings and door slammings, which occurred at more or less short intervals, although not necessarily continuously. They also found themselves being bombarded with objects - stones, mainly, but also things like apples and pears (which presumably were lying under the trees or were being stored somewhere). There were sounds - brooms sweeping, spinning wheels, water running, etc - that sounded entirely realistic but had no visible source, as in this example:

As we were sitting at the table after lunch, two of my children saw a transparent fuzzy silhouette tripping towards them from the front door, and through the corridor to the open living room door, where there were several loud knocks; the door then slammed shut in the usual way. Around one o'clock in the afternoon the sweeping was again to be heard in the dark corridor, and it carried on in front of the opened door; there, heavy muffled steps were heard, as if someone was walking away. Soon afterwards I heard a sound in my study as if someone in the little closet next door was working a spinning wheel, with the thread being turned in long pulls. The whirring of the spindle was so clear and lifelike that I was sure it was just what it sounded like. Yet I found no trace of such a thing, and it seemed that wherever I went it was always in the next room - nor did my investigations seem to disturb it. The maid claimed she had already heard this spinning several times of late; it sometimes sounded to her like the grinding of cogs, like an old Black Forest clock being wound up.

Objects were also displaced, in an apparently mischievous manner.

While the family were sitting down to coffee, the maid, sweeping by the open living room door, drew our attention to a noise upstairs. We hurried up, together with three students who had dropped in out of curiosity. In the upstairs living room a strange sight of disorder met our eyes. On the left wall a big tableau (of Amazons fighting) had been taken down and was lying upside down on the floor, as were both mirrors from the further wall. A glass sugar bowl, which normally stood on the right on the high chiffonier, lay likewise tipped over on the floor in front of it, the cover at its side. A fruit basket that had been standing on the chest-of-drawers at the backwall lay in the same condition, and the oil lamp at the far wall had moved. Next to an ornamental lamp a little sun-blind that had previously stood in a corner of the room now hung from its handle, stretched wide open. Under it a red cloth that normally hung by the window had been laid on the floor and nearby a uphostered chair lay upside down. Many of these items were fragile, yet none were broken... Meanwhile a neighbour who had just come into the house was gazing in astonishment at the weird arrangement in the living room, where all the chairs lay upside down around the table.

And in another example:

When I got to the house I discovered that shortly after my departure in the morning there had been three quick and very violent blows from under the living room floor. My wife, who was in the bedroom, went with Emaline and stood by the door; in this moment both saw a stool in the living room move slowly from its place and then in a flash turn over with its legs in the air, hitting the floor so violently that the dust from the grooves in the floorboards blew up. Then the living room doors slammed so violently that the noise could be heard far over the neighbourhood.

As a busy professional, Joller was under immense pressure to keep up with clients and court cases, while simultaneously dealing with the constant havoc in his household. Being an MP he had a reputation to think of, and to be the centre of unexplained disturbances that made him an object of gossip, speculation and innuendo, must have been intolerable. For the next six or seven weeks the Jollers had crowds gawping outside, many of them on a day-trip from nearby Lucerne. There were numerous curiosity-seekers in the house itself - probably admitted by Joller in order to back up his own claims about the inexplicability of what was happening - and at one point the crowds outside managed to break in.

In our age we're used to the phenomenon of ordinary people being suddenly engulfed in a media firestorm, often through no fault of their own. We have a lively sense of the ghastly destructive havoc it causes in their lives. In Joller's time, I guess, it wasn't so common, but this is effectively what happened to him. He calls it a "public stoning", and says: "Woe betide anyone unlucky enough to get mixed up in such a thing. He will be shown no mercy, thrown as prey to the raging monster."

By mid-October Joller was beginning to lose heart, and around the 23rd he and his family moved out of the house for the last time. As far as I'm aware, little is known about their movements after this, except that they fetched up in Rome, where Joller died some three years later.

What are we to make of it? Is any of it true?

If we think such things don't happen, and must always be attributed to hoaxing or misunderstandings, then I suppose we have to dismiss it as a confabulation, however convincing it sounds. On the other hand the case is well-known in Germany and Switzerland, and I imagine there must be documentary evidence of it, in newspaper reports, town records, personal reminiscences, and so on. In which case it could not be completely made up.

But then could it be a hoax played by one member of the family, a line that was vigorously promoted by sceptics and scoffers at the time? I think that's hard to sustain, if you accept at face value what Joller described. There was far too much going on for one person to have achieved it on his/her own, and the sheer variety of the phenomena would have required not one bit of trickery but a whole range of different devices. Nor is plausible that that a household of ten people would not have quickly discovered the tricks. It's slightly more plausible that Joller was the victim of a hoax by the rest of his family, or by a group of his children. But if you read Joller's account, you will quickly see that he was careful and methodical in his observations, and it's hard to believe that he would not quickly have figured out what was really going on.

What especially weighs with me is the rich literature around these sorts of unexplained knockings. Some of the other phenomena - stone throwing, realistic sounds, misplacement of furniture and objects - have been reported in several hundred other cases as well. So it's by no means an isolated example. If we accept that such things can occur in nature, then this would seem to be an authentic example.

But then we may go on to ask whether it has to do with psychokinesis of the living or spirits of the dead. The narrative describes a strong sense of presences in the house, and many visual sightings - in the early stages, of fuzzy or transparent shapes, but then towards the end of faces at the window glimpsed from the outside. There are also frequent sounds - of unseen people groaning, and occasionally also of speech. In this context an incident that occurs early on may have some relevance. The children are sheltering from the disturbances outside when an old crone hobbles past and engages them in conversation: it appears she knew four young girls who used to live there, and who were drowned in the nearby river in a tragic accident. So there's something there to support the idea of a haunting, although Joller does no more than hint at it and clearly does not want to go into detail.

What strikes me most about this narrative is its immense pathos. Always the most interesting thing about the paranormal for me - by far the most interesting - is that vortex of interaction between the normal and the utterly, absurdly abnormal. Many people in modern secular society are exactly like Joller. Their ideas are informed by science, and it's natural for them to abhor superstition. Tales of ghosts and things-that-go-bump are for inferior types, the weakminded. Yet very rarely, such a person is badly bitten by the real thing. Suddenly he becomes an outcast, a denizen of the world he once complacently despised, of the supernatural believer, desperately semaphoring his discovery to the world - which merely jeers, as he himself would surely have done, and takes no notice.

Throughout the narrative you sense a man clinging to the hope that if he only observed everything that was going on, and faithfully noted it down - in such a way that he could get the rest of the world to accept it - then he would remain sane and untouched. Alas for him, this did not happen. The fact that he died so soon afterwards, and in exile - ruined and perplexed - makes his story all the more poignant.

January 18, 2011

I've been thinking about poltergeists recently. Not the thing itself, whatever it may or may not be. But the way we relate to the reports.

Most reviewers of Randi's Prize have been very kind, however there was a criticism in a review by a sceptic recently that puzzled me. I'm accused of

a strange naiveté which extends well beyond the paranormal, such that at times you wonder what planet this guy is living on. He cannot believe that the Fox sisters fooled people including their parents for any length of time, or that children could cause the havoc in poltergeist cases and scare adults out of their wits, because he cannot imagine his own children doing that.

He seems to have no grasp of the world of problem children in problem families, where generation after generation after generation of children and adolescents have engaged in vandalism, anti-social behaviour, bullying and manipulation. No doubt it is difficult to imagine that the antics of local children and adolescents can drive adults to suicide, that young children can drop concrete blocks onto motorway traffic or murder toddlers, or that parents might stage the kidnapping of their own children, but these things happen.

Of course they do, but my point was to question how problem children can cause the effects that are described in these poltergeist episodes. Do their antics include making loud rapping or banging noises in such a way that they appear to come from the walls or furniture? Can they also make furniture and household objects appear to move by themselves? Because these are the specific kinds of activity that characterize so-called poltergeist cases, and they would seem to require, to a high degree, the conjuror's skills of deception, distraction and sleight-of-hand, qualities that we don't normally associate with problem children.

I went back to have another look at the statements made by Mrs Fox and various neighbours two weeks after the onset of the disturbances in 1848. As far as I know these documents aren't published online, and I'll fix that when I get round to it. In the meantime, here are some excerpts (quoted from EW Capron, Modern Spiritualism, 1855).

Let's hear first from Mrs Fox:

We first heard this noise about a fortnight ago. It sounded like some one knocking in the east bedroom, on the floor. Sometimes it sounded as if a chair moved on the floor; we could hardly tell where it was. This was in the evening, just after we had gone to bed. The whole family slept in the room together, and all heard the noise.

The first night we heard the rapping we all got up, lit a candle, and searched all over the house. The noise continued while we were hunting, and was heard near the same place all the time. It was not very loud, yet it produced a jar of the bedsteads and chairs, that could be felt by placing our hands on the chairs, or while we were in bed.

On Friday night... we went to bed early, because we had been broken so much of our rest that I was almost sick... My husband had gone to bed when we first heard the noise this evening... I knew it from all other noises I had ever heard in the house....

Mrs Fox here describes the episode of the girls clapping and clicking their fingers and finding that the raps respond. Then:

My husband went and called Mrs Redfield, our next door neighbour. She is a very candid woman. The girls were then sitting up in bed, somewhat terrified, and clinging to each other. Mrs Redfield came immediately. She came in thinking to joke and laugh at the children; but when she came she saw that we were all amazed like, and that there was something in it.

Many called him that night, who were out fishing in the creek, and they all heard the same noise. The same questions were frequently repeated as others came in, and the same answers were obtained. Some of them stayed here all night. I and my family all left the house but my husband. On the next day the house was filled to overflowing all day. Some said that there were 300 people present at this time. They appointed a committee and many questions were asked.

William Duesler, a neighbour, now appears on the scene:

Mrs Redfield came over to my house to get my wife to go over to Mr. Fox's. Mrs Redfield appeared to be very much agitated. My wife wanted I should go with them, and I accordingly went. When she told us what she wanted us to go over there for, I laughed at her, and ridiculed the idea that there was anything mysterious in it. I told her it was all nonsense, and it could easily be accounted for. This was about nine o'clock in the evening. There were some 12 or 14 persons there when I got there. Some were so frightened that they did not want to go into the room.

Duesler appears to take charge and directs the questioning. This leads to the revelation that the source of the raps was murdered and buried in the cellar, and they all go to investigate.

Charles Redfield then went down cellar with a candle. I told him to place himself in different parts of the cellar; and as he did so, I asked the question, if the person was over the place where it was buried, and I got no answer and he got over a certain place in the cellar, when it rapped. He then stepped one side, and when I asked the question, there was no noise. This was repeated several times; and we found that whenever he stood over this one place, the rapping was heard, and whenever he moved away from that place there was no answer to my questions.

On Saturday night I went over again, about seven o'clock. The house was full of people when I got there. They said it had been rapping some time. I went into the room. It was rapping in answer to questions when I went in. I went to asking questions, and asked over some of the same ones that I did the night before, and it answered me the same as it did then. I also asked different questions and it answered them... There were as many as 300 people in and around the house at this time I should think.

The singular noise which I and others have heard it is a mystery to me which I am wholly unable to solve. I'm willing to testify under oath that I did not make the noise of the rapping which I and others heard; that I do not know of any person who did or could have made them; but I spent considerable time, since then, in order to satisfy myself as to the cause of it, but cannot account it on any other ground than that it is supernatural.

The noise appeared, when we were in the cellar, to come from the ground. Some thought it was on one side, and some on the other. We could hardly tell what direction it came from. It did not sound like any noise that can be made by rapping or striking, either on the floor, or on the ground. I have since tried to make the same noise in various ways, but never succeeded in imitating it.

Some short statements by other neighbours. Elizabeth Jewel:

I never saw anything before which I could not account for in some way or other. This I am wholly at a loss to account for, unless it be a supernatural appearance. I have been acquainted with Mr. Fox and family some time, and cheerfully certify that I never saw anything in their conduct, or heard anything about them, that would lead me to suppose that they would be guilty of carrying on the trickery in order to deceive the public; on the contrary I've always looked upon them as honest, upright people, and good neighbours.

Lorren Tenney:

I have no doubt that what Mr. Fox and family are honest, and will tell the truth about this matter. It makes a great deal of trouble for Mr. Fox and his family. They are thronged with visitors, and broken their rest. The house has been searched from top to bottom, and nothing found that could make the noise. I did not go there believing that there was anything in it; but supposed that was some trickery or deception.

James Bridges:

I cannot in any way imagine how these noises can be made by any human means. If it had been heard but on one or two occasions, I should not think such a mystery, but should be satisfied that someone was cutting up a caper, in order to alarm Mr. Fox's people. But now I think that is impossible.

Mrs Fox concludes:

I'm not a believer in haunted houses or supernatural appearances. I'm very sorry there's been so much excitement about it. It has been a great deal of trouble to us. It was our misfortune to live here at this time; but I am willing and anxious that the truth should be known, and that a true statement should be made. I cannot account for these noises; all I know is that they have been heard repeatedly, as I have stated.

Her husband adds:

I do not know in what way to account for these noises being caused by natural means. We have searched in every nook and corner in and about the house, at different times, to ascertain, if possible, whether anything or anybody was secreted there that could make the noise; and have never been able to find anything that explained the mystery. It has caused a great deal of trouble and anxiety. Hundreds have visited the house, so that it is impossible to attend to our daily occupations; and I hope, whether it be natural or supernatural, the means will soon be found out.

Too bad these people weren't around forty years later to hear how they had been fooled. According to Margaret Fox, making her famous 'confession':

At night, when we went to bed, we used to tie an apple to a string and move the string up and down, causing the apple to bump on the floor, or we would drop the apple on the floor, making a strange noise every time it would rebound. Mother listened to this for a time. She could not understand it and did not suspect us of being capable of a trick because we were so young.

As far as I can gather, that's pretty much it. Apples tied to string.

It's true that Margaret in her confessional statement also talks about making the raps with the knuckles, joints and toes, but this was only afterwards, when they were taken by their elder sister to the nearby town of Rochester. During the initial outbreak there could have been no time to switch to the more sophisticated method, which in any case Margaret says required quite a bit of practice.

I'm struck by the fact that the girls hardly appear in these witness statements at all. There's a mention of two girls (unidentified) in the cellar, where the action had shifted, so presumably there were in the thick of it. And I suppose the fact of their presence can be held to support the theory that they were also creating the noises. But try as I might, I can't see how all these people could be so seriously bothered and bewildered by two young girls bumping apples tied to string on the floor.

There's also the question of the girls' ages, which I discussed in Randi's Prize. In her confession, Margaret makes a big deal about the fact that they were such young children ('I was eight, and just a year and a half older than she'). By her account this had three consequences: one, their mother did not suspect them of playing a trick; two, they did not see how wrong it was play tricks; and three, they had the flexibility required to train themselves to make rapping noises with their feet. Yet their mother's statement, made shortly after the event, has them as fourteen and twelve. I think we can join up the dots.

In parenthesis, I recently came across this short 2008 article by a historian, which references contemporary census information, and which of course I would have cited if I'd been aware of it. From this it appears that over the years the two women had been revising their ages downwards, to the point where Margaret stated, two years before her confession:

When Spiritualism first originated at Hydesville, Wayne County, in 1848, we were little children, and have no recollection of the events said to have occurred at that early period."

No recollection at all...

There's an issue of trust here. The confession statement looks tricksy to me. On the other hand I'd still maintain that parents really do understand their children, their characters and what they are and aren't capable of. Certainly in a context like this.

And again, as I discussed in my book, these events correlate quite closely with a number of other similar episodes of unexplained noises that witnesses describe as 'raps', 'knocks', 'bangings' - often appearing to have an intelligent source. (See here for my description of a 1974 case bearing close similarities to the Fox episode.) Another reason, surely, for taking the witness testimony seriously.

Preposterous and unbelievable? Of course, but there's no reason why we shouldn't get to grips with this problem. There's a lot of documented material out there. I agree that it requires a high degree of tolerance of mystery, which by definition is problematic for sceptics. The review I mentioned at the beginning of this piece concludes as follows:

What paranormal advocates have to understand is not only do they have to provide repeatable experiments or observations and provide a theory which clearly explains (in mathematical terms if not everyday language) what exactly is going on in these anomalous events/experiences, but also that theory also has to explain, at least as well, and preferably better, all known, normal phenomena as well.

Sure, I'd love to see these things neatly explained, but I suspect it's not going to happen at all soon. This isn't a nice tidy world, it's the world we just happen to live in, and we have to try to make sense of it. However we can't do it all at once. Having the clarity to recognize anomalies when they occur, and the courage to grapple with them, is a necessary first step.

The case occurred over several months in a terraced house in South Shields, a coastal town in north east England. It started in December 2005 with anomalous movements of furniture and objects, and the following June came to the attention of Hallowell and Ritson, who staged an investigation over a period of several months. The victims were a young couple, Marc and Marianne, and their three-year old son Robert.

Some typical incidents logged by the couple early on include the following:

21.4pm: We ... found two chairs had been stacked on top of one another on top of the table in the bedroom.

5.00pm. The chest of drawers [from Robert's room] was pulled out onto the landing on the top of the stairs and the large box full of stuff was moved from one bedroom to another.

5.10pm. While in the bedroom two toys were thrown at Marianne and Marc.

5.20pm: the door leading into the kitchen opened three times on its own..

Often investigators arrive after the disturbances have lost much of their force and don't see much happening. But that's not the case here. The authors were present during many of the disturbances, and photographed and filmed many of them. One particularly convincing incident was a plastic water bottle which one of them saw and photographed balancing diagonally on the table, a quite unnatural position.

Repressed emotion in living individuals is quite often thought to be responsible in cases of this kind, but the investigators soon rejected this. They had a strong sense of an independent entity wanting to stir up trouble. In fact it soon became obvious that the poltergeist was trying to frighten the couple. Once they found their child's rocking horse hanging by one its reins from the loft hatch in the ceiling. In another particular sinister incident, a large toy bunny was found in a chair placed at the top of the stairs, holding a box cutter blade in one of its paws. The poltergeist also took to writing threatening messages on a doodle-board in the child's bedroom, and in the later stages sent text messages to Marianne's mobile phone, such as 'get you bitch' and 'You're Dead'.

As time wore on the phenomena intensified. Big red weals appeared suddenly on Marc's torso and vanished equally mysteriously, in front of several witnesses. The investigators watched cupboard doors swinging open, light-shades swinging, the quilt on the bed moving. The couple were seriously frightened when the child himself was moved. On the first occasion they found him lying on the floor tightly wrapped in his bed quilt, with a plastic table on top of him. The child himself seemed to be asleep, but his eyes were wide open, as if he was in a trance. Another time the child appeared to have vanished altogether, and was eventually found in a closet, tightly cocooned in a blanket.

In fact no real harm seems to have ever been done, but the couple were terrified, and the authors speculate the poltergeist was trying to create fear in order to generate emotion that it could feed from. They compare the case with the Amherst Incident of 1878 in Nova Scotia, where death threats to the occupants were found scratched on the walls.

What to make of it all? The case fits a classic pattern in many ways, and reads like a very detailed account of what we are long familiar with from other accounts. The investigators quickly eliminated any possibility of Marianne staging a hoax - she was obviously frightened, and in any case was not involved in phenomena they themselves witnessed. They were at first less sure about Marc, largely because he didn't seem to react very much to the incidents, and was the type who might have enjoyed playing pranks. But they were certain he could not have been responsible for incidents they witnessed themselves, and by the end of the investigation had totally abandoned any idea of fraud.

I'm certain this book will soon become a classic of its kind, a very full and detailed description of eye-witness testimony, that will be compared with the Enfield case (Playfair provides a short foreword) and the Columbus, Ohio case described by William Roll in Unleashed. I'm not sure how much it will resonate with people who are not already convinced that such things do happen. I would personally like to have seen more independent corroboration of the kind that one often gets in other cases - from reporters, police officers, social workers etc. It's true there are 15 or so statements from other eyewitnesses, but most of these are from paranormal investigators who the authors invited to the house, and only witnessed one set of phenomena. The quantity and quality of eyewitness testimony can count for as much as of the phenomena itself.

On the other hand it might not have been in the couple's best interests to involve other people. And it's good to see such a rich episode being written up so fully and so readably. As a recent in-depth description of a puzzling phenomenon the book has few rivals, and will be an important addition to the literature.

March 17, 2008

Here's a familiar story. Two young girls are in bed one night when they hear a curious tapping noise coming from somewhere in the room. This happens on several consecutive nights. It seems to emanate from the wall, and they think at first it must be coming from the house next door. But then, weirdly, they realize that the noise is responding to them, even when they are whispering so quietly that no one outside the room could possibly hear. They find they can communicate with it, by asking questions and getting it to knock once for yes, two for no, and three for don't know. For more complex queries it will rap out the letter of the alphabet (five knocks for E, 13 for M, etc). The whole family soon gets involved, and gather nightly to ask the unseen entity about itself and get it to answer questions about themselves, which it often does correctly. The house is soon filled with neighbours, local clergy, police, mediums and investigators, all coming to wonder at the phenomenon and try to figure out what's causing it.

The strange story of the Fox sisters is usually the first thing that you read about in any general book about spiritualism and the paranormal. You may go on to hear that that having established they could communicate through raps the spirits later came through at séances, launching the cult of spiritualism that quickly swept the developed world. If it's a debunking book the mystery will then be revealed: towards the end of their lives the girls admitted it was a prank played on their parents, first by bumping apples tied to string on the floor, and then by manipulating their toes and joints to create the rapping noises. This segues naturally into reflections about the gullibility of the superstitious masses, and their reprehensible failure to accept it was all a trick.

Either way, the impression most of these books leave you with is that the Fox incident was a one-off. But of course this tale of raps and codes and spooky communications is widely reported. It's not exactly common, but it's so distinctive, and often reported in such detail, as to create the appearance of a phenomenon in its own right. When Tony Cornell and Alan Gauld tabulated 500 documented poltergeist-type cases back in the late 1970s they found that around half involved exactly this kind of rapping noises, often described as knocks, thumps, thuds, bangings and suchlike, for which no cause can be found. They say 16% involve communication, of which presumably the majority involve this method. [Poltergeists, pp. 224-40]

The case I mentioned earlier is actually not the Fox sisters, but concerns the Andrews family in Andover, Hampshire, in 1974. It was investigated by Barrie G. Colvin, who says he was prevented by the family from publishing more than an outline at the time. Ten years later they were still unwilling to have it publicised but now that more than 30 years have elapsed, and the family has moved from the area, there is no longer an issue about this, and he has written it up in the latest SPR Journal, using pseudonyms.

Colvin seems to have been quite through, paying a total of nine visits over a ten-week period. As well as interviewing the family about the origins of the case he had plenty of opportunity to hear the raps himself and establish that they were not the result of trickery or other visible cause. The focus seems to have been Theresa, the younger of the two girls aged 12. Colvin also established to his own satisfaction that the source had intelligence of a sort, calling itself Eric Waters, although it does not seem to have provided any coherent information beyond that. At one point a medium claimed the noises were being made by a young boy whose body was buried under the floorboards; nothing more is mentioned about this, and subsequent investigations failed to turn up anyone of that name who had lived in the area.

Colvin did attempt a small experiment, persuading 'Eric' to transfer the noises from the wall of the room to the headboard of Theresa's bed. As follows:

[Mrs Andrews] then said: "Eric, please try to knock on the headboard." This was followed by a very soft tap which was heard by us all. I was at that moment standing very close indeed to the headboard, with my ear about 15 cm from it. As Mrs Andrews repeated the request, I put my hand on the headboard to see whether I could feel any sensation. Eric rapped progressively louder on the headboard and I could clearly feel the vibration.

It's interesting how often vibrations in the bed headboard feature in poltergeist literature. This is just one example, from the 1960 case in Sauchi in Scotland:

On entering at the front door he heard loud knockings in progress. Going upstairs he found Virginia awake, but not greatly excited, in the double bed... The loud knocking noise continued and appeared to emanate from the bed-head. Mr. Lund moved Virginia down in to the bed so that she could not strike or push the bed-head with her head, and he also verified that her feet were well tucked in under the bed-clothes, and held in by them. The knocking continued. During the knocking Mr. Lund held the bed-head. He felt it vibrating in unison with the noises. [A.R.G. Owen (1964) Can We Explain The Poltergeist?, pp. 148-9.]

The responsiveness is less common, but is still widely reported. Perhaps the best known case of the kind is reported by William Barrett, investigating a case in a farmhouse in Derrygonnelly in 1877:

To avoid any error or delusion on my part, I put my hands in the side pockets of my overcoat and asked it to knock the number of fingers I had open. It correctly did so. Then with a different number of fingers open each time, the experiment was repeated four times in succession, and four times I obtained absolutely the correct number of raps ['Poltergeists Old and New', SPR Proceedings 25, 1911, pp. 377-412]

The Andrews family seem to have been rather ambivalent about the case, enjoying the novelty of communicating with an unseen entity, but becoming frightened when the taps and raps turned into loud bangings, especially when they went on for hours and deprived them of sleep. By Colvin's last visit it seemed to have faded out, however. While the family treated Eric has a deceased spirit, Colvin's view is that no discarnate entity was involved, and that the case fits the pattern of repressed emotion in the living, although there was no outward sign of this, the family being apparently happy and stable.

Of course none of this would convince a sceptic: it's hard to share an investigator's conviction of the paranormality of an event without copious reassurances, diagrams, descriptions, signed statements by witnesses with impeccable rationalist credentials, and so on, and probably not even then. But my understanding is that sceptics actually never get that close to the phenomenon, in real life or even in books. If you look at the debunking literature you will quickly find that there are two main sources: James Randi's article on the Columbus, Ohio case of 1984 and a clutch of cases mentioned by another debunking magician Milbourne Christopher in his book Seers, Psychics and ESP (1970). Neither of the magicians witnessed anything (the families concerned would not let them into the house) and in any case they do not really involve this rapping phenomenon.

I'd be interested to know if debunkers like Joe Nickell who rely on these two sources to such an extent have any sensible ideas about this, beyond insisting that the teenagers are playing tricks, and that everyone else is too dim-witted to notice. Considering how insistent they are that the Fox sisters case was a hoax, and the mileage they get from it, it's a contribution they should be encouraged to make.

February 12, 2008

Durham Council has paid an exorcist to get rid of a poltergeist. The spook had been causing trouble in a council house in Peterlee: the occupants, 23-year old Sabrina Fallon and her husband Martin, reported 'bangings' in the loft, followed by other strange happenings: doors slamming shut, the ghost of a little girl on the landing and her own dressing gown 'floating down the stairs'.

A local psychic was rung up, diagnosed an angry male named Peter who wanted to possess the couple's 16-month old daughter, and later carried out an exorcism. It seemed to do the trick: peace has returned, the Fallons say. Apparently the council later told them that 50 years ago an occupant of the house hanged himself after killing his wife.

I wonder if someone's going to make something out of this. There has been a notable lack of public outcry so far, probably because it only cost the council £60. You can't fault its reasoning - if it does the job, then why not, and it would have cost far more to rehouse the couple. There have been a few readers' complaints about wasting taxpayers money, along with other comments like this: 'if i was a ghost i wouldnt haunt a dilapidated council house i would go for a statly home'. But no one so far seems too upset, probably because of the paltriness of the sum involved.

Sceptics will blame the couple's overactive imagination (Richard Dawkins recommends that such 'disturbed' people should be 'packed off to a good psychiatrist' - Unweaving the Rainbow,p. 129). But it's curious how many documented cases of this kind describe 'bangings', also referred to as 'raps' and 'knockings', for which there is seldom any explanation, and which even seem sometimes to have an intelligent source. (Poltergeists by investigators Alan Gauld and Tony Cornell gives a good idea of the scale of the phenomenon.)

As always, I'm fascinated by an occurrence that everyone involved - the family, the local authorities, the psychic, and, I guess, a large part of the public - accept as what it appears to be, the anguish of a discarnate human, but which science says can't and didn't happen.

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‘These disturbing phenomena seem to deny all our
usual scientific ideas. How we should like to discredit
them! Unfortunately the statistical evidence, at
least for telepathy, is overwhelming. It is very difficult
to rearrange one’s ideas so as to fit these new facts in.’
Alan Turing, computer scientist.

‘I have noticed that if a small group of intelligent people,
not supposed to be impressed by psychic research, get
together and such matters are mentioned, and all feel
that they are in safe and sane company, usually from a
third to a half of them begin to relate exceptions. That
is to say, each opens a little residual closet and takes
out some incident which happened to them or to some
member of their family, or to some friend whom they
trust and which they think odd and extremely puzzling.’
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When a distinguished but elderly scientist states that something is possible he is almost certainly right. When he states that something is impossible, he is very probably wrong. Arthur C. Clarke

‘Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest
manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian
conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down
before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every
preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to
whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing.’
Thomas Henry Huxley

We can always immunize a theory against refutation. There are many such immunizing tactics; and if nothing better occurs to us, we can always deny the objectivity – or even the existence – of the refuting observation. Those intellectuals who are more interested in being right than in learning something interesting but unexpected are by no means rare exceptions. Karl Popper, on the defenders of materialism.

If we have learned one thing from the history of invention and discovery, it is that, in the long run - and often in the short one - the most daring prophecies seem laughably conservative. Arthur C. Clarke.